The Ending Of Cruel Summer Season 2 Explained
Contains spoilers for "Cruel Summer" Season 2
The second season of Freeform's anthology series "Cruel Summer" premiered on June 5. It begins with Isabella LaRue (Lexi Underwood) coming to the small coastal town of Chatham as an exchange student and staying with the Landry family, but ends with the dramatic aftermath of local boy Luke Chambers' (Griffin Gluck) mysterious death. Telling the story through a non-linear storyline like the first season, it spans the summer of 1999 when Megan Landry (Sadie Stanley) and her friends are 17, the Christmas and New Year period at the turn of the century, and the summer of 2000 after high school.
While the cast felt some pressure to replicate the success of Season 1, they were excited to bring a new story to the screen. Speaking to The Buzz at the season premiere, Stanley teased, "All the best parts of Season 1 follow through into our season. I think the stakes are really high and I think that you should be suspicious of a different character every episode and hopefully we leave everybody, like, shocked at the end."
Given that none of the cast members knew who Luke's killer was until they filmed the final episode, "Cruel Summer" Season 2 certainly keeps its secrets close to the vest. And in true mystery thriller style, there are tons of twists and turns right up until the last second. So much happens in Episode 10 alone, which is aptly titled "Endgame," but we've broken down and analyzed every detail. This is the ending of "Cruel Summer" Season 2 explained.
What you need to remember about the plot of Cruel Summer Season 2
"Cruel Summer" showrunner Elle Triedman created this season of the show around Megan and Isabella's "ride or die" friendship. She told People, "I remember, especially at that age, you can have a friendship that is so much more intense than a romantic relationship." However, their intense friendship attracts drama, with Isabella dating Luke for the summer of 1999 before he gets together with Megan, who is his childhood best friend.
Drama also comes from the sex tapes Luke and his older brother Brent (Braeden De La Garza) record, including the one of Luke and Megan which is accidentally played at their 1999 Christmas party in Episode 1. However, everyone assumes it's Isabella on the tape, and the trio goes along with the lie to protect Megan's scholarship to the University of Washington. This is just one of Megan's many lies, as we learn that she's secretly been working as a coder-slash-hacker for the Chambers' severely paranoid neighbor Ned Faunce (Ben Cotton).
More secrets are revealed in Episode 9 when we learn about Megan and Isabella's revenge plot on Luke. After they catch him bragging about stringing them both along, they take him to the cabin, tie him up, drug him, and force him to confess his sins on camera. However, things get a bit out of control and Isabella shoots him in the ear before she convinces Megan to leave him there for the night. Luke eventually frees himself and gets down to the dock, where he pages a mysterious figure for help.
What happened at the end of Cruel Summer Season 2?
The ending of "Cruel Summer" Season 2 picks up with Luke on the dock and we learn he paged Brent for help. However, the episode quickly cuts to their dad Steve (Paul Adelstein) finding Brent sopping wet in the kitchen of their main house, with Luke nowhere in sight. Later we learn the brothers argued on the dock before Brent pushed Luke down, where he hit his head and fell into the water. When Luke doesn't resurface, Brent realizes it wasn't a joke and dives into the water but fails to find him. Steve, also unable to find Luke, then works overtime to protect his only remaining son, no matter the cost.
Six months later, in August 2000, Sheriff Myer (Sean Blakemore) closes in on Megan and Isabella as the main suspects in Luke's death, but they confuse him with their premeditated plan to shift the blame onto the other. Though their friendship is irrevocably damaged, the pair works together to hack Ned's security tapes and they discover that Steve went up to the cabin that night. But, before they can give the sheriff irrefutable proof, Isabella hightails it out of town and Megan is arrested for Luke's murder as she previously admitted to being the last person to see him alive.
Feeling guilty that his pseudo-sister is going to take the blame for something she didn't do, Brent admits that he's responsible for Luke's death. He's arrested, along with his father who is charged as an accessory, and Megan is released.
The final twist
The "Cruel Summer" Season 2 finale takes one big swing after another and reveals key details about Luke's death right down to the final seconds of the episode. Although the case is closed and Brent and Steve have been charged, that's not the end of the story. In fact, when Megan goes back to the dock to say goodbye to Luke (who she has forgiven and is now grieving), she discovers a hidden camera that proves what everyone believes happened isn't the case.
The camera footage reveals that Luke's death wasn't an accident, as Megan had reassured Brent when he confessed to her in the police station — it was actually murder, but Brent didn't do it. Although his brother and father were unable to find him, we learn that Luke later washed up on shore, weak from his injuries. Here, he's found by Isabella, who likely returned to threaten him some more — she did tell Megan that she thought they let him off lightly, after all.
However, Isabella's natural instincts take over and after she checks no one else is around, she pushes his face down into the water with her foot. Luke weakly struggles beneath her before giving in. Once he's dead, Isabella kicks his body back into the water so it floats away and won't be found. After watching the footage, Megan sobs alone in her room and the finale concludes before we can see what she does with it.
Was Isabella playing Megan all along?
Once they establish themselves as the others' "ride or die," Megan and Isabella forge an intense bond — but it is muddied by lies. First from Isabella, who lies about her past, and then from Megan, who lies about working with Ned and regularly sneaks off to meet him. However, Luke is the source of most of their issues as he gaslights Megan into thinking the worst about Isabella and manipulates Isabella into believing Megan doesn't truly care about her, all the while bragging to his friends that he's lining up a threesome between them.
After Isabella takes the revenge plot too far by shooting Luke, and after one too many lies (not telling her about the kiss at the Plunge right away), Megan loses all faith in their friendship. But, since we discover that Isabella was actually the one who killed Luke at the end of the episode, viewers are left re-evaluating everything. Was she playing Megan and feeding off all the drama of them "being in the trenches together" the whole time?
In "Endgame," Isabella seems to have no problem looking after number one, giving the sheriff a doctored version of the videotape of the night Luke died, which makes it seem like Megan attacked Luke and acted alone. Since Isabella was supposed to destroy the footage after that night, she obviously held onto it for months in case the occasion arose where she would need to use it. If it weren't for Brent's confession, Megan would have gotten sent to prison.
Consent is a problem in Cruel Summer
It's the '90s, so of course videotapes play an important part in this series, and more often than not, videotapes are used by one character to control or harm another. And what's worse, many of the tapes are of private, intimate moments, filmed without the consent of the female characters.
Almost every episode of "Cruel Summer" Season 2 references Brent's collection of sex tapes, many he made himself without the knowledge of his sexual partners. In Episode 8, he brags to his friends that "homemade porn is the new frontier, all you need is a video camera" and boasts that he has a copy of Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee's infamous tape. Luke also films and distributes a tape of himself and Megan having sex, which he made without her permission. However, the issue of consent is never really addressed or called out. More often than not, it's swept under the rug by figures of authority like their dad Steve, who perpetuates a "boys will be boys" mentality and covers up their misdeeds.
Like father like son, according to Griffin Gluck, who thinks his character Luke's sexist behavior is a product of his environment. "I don't think he wants to be a toxic guy," he told Freeform. "It's mostly, I think, a nature versus nurture thing. I think that's something really interesting about, you know, his mother's passing. I feel like if she was still around, he wouldn't have that toxic masculinity."
Steve Chambers has a habit of covering up crimes
In "Cruel Summer" Season 2, Steve Chambers spends more time bribing authority figures and covering up crimes than he does parenting his kids. We get a glimpse of how far he'll go to protect himself in Episode 3 when he gets Brent off with a warning for making the sex tapes.
Then, of course, he proves that he'll do anything to protect the Chambers' name, no matter how wrong it is. Steve spends six months stealthily covering up Brent's actions and instead, he guns for Ned, Isabella, or even Megan to take the fall for Luke's death. It doesn't matter to him as long as Brent's in the clear. If he appears completely ruthless in his pursuit of protecting his family's carefully curated reputation, it's not a surprise; turns out this isn't the first death he's covered up.
"Endgame" provides another shocking revelation: Steve covered up the details of his wife's death. The finale reveals that she had been drunk driving, but Steve told everyone that Luke, who was just a child at the time, had been distracting her. This is what caused the fight between Luke and Brent, who didn't want to believe the truth. Brent finally accepting this reality is one of the factors that leads him to tell Megan the truth at the police station. Turning himself in is his way to break their family's controlling, immoral, and illegal cycle, which Steve has been perpetuating.
Isabella got away with murder twice
At times, Isabella seems very earnest in her friendship with Megan, and she's obviously desperate for her approval. However, her former beau Trevor Cole (Olly Sholotan) soon shows up in town to cast some pretty big shadows over her and her motives. Though his appearance is brief, he forwards some important information to Megan so he can set the story straight about Isabella's character. He sends her newspaper clippings proving that his sister Lisa — Isabella's so-called long-distance bestie — actually drowned under suspicious circumstances back in St. Barts. Whether Isabella actually murdered Lisa is purposefully left open to interpretation according to Elle Triedman, but we suspect Luke's drowning isn't the only one she's responsible for.
Isabella escaped the aftermath of that situation — and any legal charges — by fleeing to her new life in Chatham. She does the same thing again a year later, leaving Megan to pick up the pieces. And, just in case you needed any more proof that Isabella thrives on unhinged drama, the "Cruel Summer" Season 2 finale gives viewers a glimpse of where she ends up next. We see her on a plane to Ibiza, where she meets a girl of similar age named Michelle (Dylan Ratzlaff). She tells Michelle about the wonderful year she spent with her best friend Megan, before introducing herself as Lisa and offering to be Michelle's party guide once they land. Could she soon become the suspect in a third death?
What's next for the residents of Chatham?
While the rest of Megan's classmates make plans for their freshman year of college, she is stuck in Chatham with nowhere to go. She lost her scholarship to the University of Washington because of their honor code and begins to see her dream of working as a coder for Google or Apple slipping away. But, happily, once the murder charges against her are dropped, she is given the chance at a hopeful future thanks to Ned. He gives Megan's name to an old friend who wants to offer her a real, legitimate job beginning at the end of summer. This moment is a subtle lesson on not judging a book by its cover, as it proves Ned has always been a real friend to Megan and not the dangerous thug the town made him out to be.
The finale is happy news for the Landry family all around, as Debbie (KaDee Strickland) is also in remission. However, things might not be so good on the work front, since Steve was her boss and he's now in prison. However, Debbie proved that she more than knows her stuff at the Christmas party where she was busy schmoozing clients, so perhaps she'll be able to step up and take over Steve's commercial development. It certainly would be good to see a woman making a positive impact on Chatham.
There were multiple endings filmed for Cruel Summer Season 2
Besides Megan and Isabella's friendship, which was the core of "Cruel Summer" Season 2, there was one other constant for Elle Triedman while she was creating the show: Luke was always going to die. However, it wasn't planned from the get-go that Isabella was going to be the one to do it. "We started out actually playing at a lot of different scenarios," Triedman revealed to People. "In a writer's room, you explore a ton of different avenues ... It was also the question of, 'Do we want an accident or do we want clear-cut murder?' And an accident is just never as satisfying. It's more realistic probably a lot of the time, but it didn't seem to fit this story," she explained.
Triedman teased that there were alternative scenarios where characters like Debbie could have been the killer. For that outcome, it would have been a case of a mother going to extremes to protect her daughter. But Sheriff Myer was also floated as a potential suspect, so Triedman may well have been teeing him up for a corrupt cop storyline.
Interestingly, more than one ending was actually filmed for the series, too, according to KaDee Strickland, who admitted to Us Weekly that she waited to watch the finale along with the audience so she could get the same reveal. But, like Triedman said, going with Isabella murdering Luke was the best clear-cut ending for the season.
Elle Triedman said the show's central message is about teenagers learning from their mistakes
There's no doubt that the second season of "Cruel Summer" delivers dramatic twists at every turn, and of course, that's what keeps it so thrilling. But another thing that makes the show so gripping is how realistic the everyday lives and issues of the teen characters are, and this keeps it grounded. So, while there end up being some pretty crazy events happening around them — for the purposes of drama, of course — they're all just trying to move forward and work out what comes next for them.
As Elle Triedman put it to People: "They're trying on different personas, they're trying to figure out who they are and how they fit in." She continued, explaining, "I think it's really important to remember these are high school kids. These are teenagers. They need room to correct. They can't be tarnished forever by some completely stupid, knucklehead thing they did when they were 17."
The core message that Triedman wants viewers to take away is that it's normal to still be figuring things out when you're a teenager (or even older), but what's most important is that you learn from your mistakes. This is something that Luke tries to do as he proclaims to Brent on the dock that he can't go on lying about their mom's death. He ultimately acknowledges everything he did wrong and perhaps would have even tried to make it right if he was given the chance.
Cruel Summer Season 2 doesn't tie up all of its loose ends
Although "Cruel Summer" Season 2 makes the fact that Isabella killed Luke pretty clear-cut, it's the last scene of the series finale and it leaves viewers with some pretty big unanswered questions. Did Isabella always plan to kill Luke? What happens immediately after Megan sees the tape? Does she take it to the sheriff so he can put out an arrest warrant for Isabella (despite her being on a different continent)? And will Brent and Steve be released from prison or get their sentences reduced now that there's proof Luke wasn't killed by his brother? But, perhaps the biggest question of all is whose camera was it? There are plenty of characters we can speculate about, including Luke having put the camera there himself, but according to Elle Triedman, the ending is meant to be left open to interpretation.
However, the showrunner did answer some of the small unexplained plot points — like what happened with Megan's pregnancy. She confirmed to People that this was a false positive. "Perhaps it was also the traumatic event of New Year's Eve, but she would've gotten her period like a week or two later. It's never explicit," she explained.